Panludia
COMMUNITY INTEGRATION
PAYDAY 2Archipelago randomizer mod
Criminal Dawn turns PAYDAY 2 into a multiworld roguelite. Build a crew from received upgrades, push through a chain of heists and send rewards through score milestones and safehouse improvements.
Maintained by CATEM1NAL, jordansds
- Reviewed build
- Criminal Dawn 1.0.12 / APWorld 1.0.4
- OS
- Windows
- Last reviewed
- 9 Oct 2026
- Installation
- Manual installation
How the game changes
- Score from heists, loot and combat sends checks at increasing thresholds. Progression items raise the score cap, so the entire pool cannot be farmed from the first heist without receiving anything.
- Safehouse room upgrades send additional checks. Coins fund those upgrades, while non-score goals also track the furthest heist milestones reached.
- Original mode asks for a successful chain of tiered heists; Campaign uses a fixed themed sequence; Score completes the score-check objective with freely randomized heists.
- The default preset uses four heists, four safehouse tiers and a base of 68 score checks. Generation adds score checks for safehouse tiers and item-pool capacity, so 68 is not the final location count.
- Skill and Perk items produce a build that rerolls between attempts. Progressive Perma-Skills and Perma-Perks retain a fixed sequence of bonuses, while Extra Bots and Extra Lives expand survival options.
- Weapon, armor and deployable rewards offer choices from randomly selected equipment. This is a substantial gameplay overhaul, including revised health, armor, enemy balance and stamina, not just shuffled vanilla pickups.
- A shared run timer starts when masking up and carries between heists. Progression extends it and accelerates objectives. The default Infinite Time setting eventually removes the timer after sufficient progression.
- In-game options control the difficulty cap, mutator behavior, available heists and DeathLink. DeathLink sends on heist failure; receiving one consumes a down on subsequent damage, with a separate lethal setting.
- The maintainer provides four- and six-heist presets, shorter Turbo variants, a campaign preset and a score preset. Their approximate three-to-six-hour estimates assume prompt progression delivery, not a guaranteed multiworld duration.
- Mod 1.0.12 adds Under the Hammer to the owned-DLC pools and heist settings, corrects two melee-weapon identifier mappings and fixes the zipline speed multiplier. Its APWorld remains 1.0.4.
Before you start
- Use Criminal Dawn 1.0.12 with APWorld 1.0.4 from the same release. The World archive is unchanged from the previously listed pair and requires Archipelago 0.6.7 or later.
- Install SuperBLT, extract BLT-Criminal_Dawn.zip into PAYDAY 2/mods and follow the dependency prompts for BeardLib, MutatorHelper and CSLMM. The setup requires additional game restarts before first use. Those moving dependency downloads are not pinned to the reviewed package hashes.
- Back up your normal and mod saves. Connect the Criminal Dawn client to the correct room and slot before launching PAYDAY 2: save switching happens in the client, while the game reads its save at startup. A failed switch is not an atomic operation; preserve backups before following reset instructions.
- The executable setting still names payday2_win32_release.exe. Select an executable that exists in your installation. The maintainer’s earlier 64-bit matchmaking caveat and -steamMM workaround are not resolved by the three gameplay fixes in this update.
- Everyone in one PAYDAY lobby must use the same Archipelago seed and slot. The game checks those identities during normal progress writes. Different multiworld slots should run separate crews.
- Only enable campaigns and DLC content you can actually launch. Random DLC pools inspect ownership, but a selected campaign has a fixed heist list. Under the Hammer support does not grant its entitlement.
- Keep Early Bot enabled for solo play and avoid BigLobby for a first run. Its extra bots do not contribute to the mod’s progression counter in the same way as the World expects. Do not disable every eligible heist; the selector has no safe fallback for an empty pool.
- The final safehouse tier is modeled with fewer coins than are required to buy every remaining room upgrade. Use the supplied presets and treat uncommon option combinations as unverified, particularly Score mode with many safehouse tiers.
- Cumulative score, room upgrades and heist milestones are saved and re-read after reconnection. This gives checks and goal completion a replay path, but interrupted JSON writes and repeated item packets remain weaknesses. Confirm important progress and keep save backups.
- This review covers the documented Windows route. The exact mod and World were inspected as code and files; no full campaign, dependency stack, Linux/Proton or VR session was tested. Complete notices and individual provenance for the packed textures are not established.